


Indivisible

by SusieBeeca



Series: Gems With Disabilities [7]
Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Amputee, Conjoined Twins, Disability, F/F, Gen, Introspection, Post-Episode: s05e03 Off Colors, Sisterhood, Twins, Wet Dream, mild mild mild twincest, phantom limb syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-06
Updated: 2017-07-06
Packaged: 2018-11-28 14:15:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11419716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SusieBeeca/pseuds/SusieBeeca
Summary: She was forever on the left. Me, forever on the right. And forever between us, that crevice, that void where we should have been whole.She was trying to sleep. I don't know why I liked watching her.We never were very good at keeping secrets from each other, but sometimes my sister still surprises me.





	Indivisible

“Sister.”

I wanted to reach down and brush my knuckles across her face, but I was leaning back on my arm, and couldn’t move it without jolting her out of her reverie. Humanlars had told us that re-awakening would be startling if it was done too abruptly. And she looked so calm, so untroubled like this. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her without some tension picking at her eyes.

I tilted my foot to the side and gently curled my toes against hers. In her sleep, she smiled. Then giggled. It felt like a sort of warm glow deep on my side of our gem. Laughter was a scarce resource down here.

“Sister,” I said again, “It’s time to wake up.”

Her shoulder twitched, and as the empty socket beneath it moved, I felt a tremor run down my arm. The shivering feeling was uncomfortable, but at least it was better than the jarring phantom pain I sometimes felt in the hand I was born without. Neither of us can understand why the separate parts of our bodies seemed to remember things that had never been.

I toed her foot again, and noticed her eyelids fluttering as she roused. I hissed my relief through my lips. Many times Fluorite had tried to tell us of the benefits of being permanently joined together, but she really had no idea what this was like. My sister and I didn’t share a head, a mind, so I didn’t know what, precisely, she was dreaming of... but I could guess at the general theme. We did share genitals, after all.

Her eyes opened, and she gave me a lazy smile as she rubbed her knuckles over her eyes. “Oh... I was having the loveliest dream,” she murmured.

“You certainly seemed to be enjoying yourself,” I ventured as I pulled my weight off my arm.

She must’ve sensed my discomfort---I can never hide too much from her---and bumped her knee against mine. “Is something wrong?” she said in a little voice. I could tell that, groggy as she was, she was starting to piece things together. “Did you---um---f-feel what I was feeling?”

I tried to hide my smile. “From the waist down, yes.”

Her hand flew to her mouth as her cheeks turned a darker red. “Oh, I-I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to---”

I just chuckled, pushing her cowlick off her forehead. “I know, I know. I’m just teasing you.”

She pulled herself into a sitting position, which eased a bit of the strain on our pelvis. “You should, um...” she began as she scratched at her useless shoulder. “You should try sleeping sometime,” she went on. “It’s... it’s interesting.”

“’Interesting’? That’s how you’d describe it?”

She rolled her eyes. “Enlightening, then.”

 _It would be,_ I thought. _How nice it must be to dream of doing the kind of carnal acts we’ve never been able to experience._

“I don’t like the idea,” I told her. It was only a half-lie, but I knew she’d catch the half-truth. “I wouldn’t like being so... vulnerable.”

She touched my cheek with all her usual gentleness. “I’d be there,” she said. “I’d be there to look after you.”

I could never resist that smile. That smile that must have looked so much like my own---my own face, the one thing of ours I’d never actually seen.

“I was thinking,” she stammered as her eyes darted away, “That maybe we should call each other something... different.”

“Like what, sister?”

“Like that!” she said sharply, jabbing her finger at me. “Like something else besides ‘sister’!”

“You---”

“That’s all we’ve ever known each other as,” she said with a deflated sigh, her eyes wandering down our legs, to where our knees were knocking. “Doesn’t it make you feel like... like some sort of lesser-than?”

I hated to point out the obvious, but... “We’re off-colours. We ARE ‘lesser-than’.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it!” she snapped. The hitch in her voice was a surprise. “I meant lesser than the others! Lesser than our friends! Our _family!_ Lesser than everyone else who at least have their own names!” She put her hand to her chest. “Sister, don’t you want something that’s all your own?”

I didn’t know how to answer, and she knew it.

“Remember what Humanlars told us?” she ventured as she picked at her fingernail with her teeth.

“Sh.. _He_ told us a lot of things,” I replied. That new pronoun still felt like an odd tickle on my tongue.

Sister’s eyes grew all warm and misty, and they silently begged me to open up to her just as she had to me. Despite everything, there still was a wall. “Remember the stories he told us about sur... cirk... I mean, um...”

“Circuses,” I finished for her.

“Yes, circuses. With human oddities. Humans who weren’t meant to turn out the way they did.”

I had to smirk at that. Yes, the gemless creature had babbled a bit about sideshows from his planet---stories about those who were considered ‘freaks’ for being too tall, too short, too hairy. Too many limbs, or too few. Genders that were forcibly separated, but then mashed together again. Even in a world where creatures were born without embedded rocks that would forever determine their purpose, some were still just too _odd_.

“Gems like us,” she whispered, “On Earth... we could be cured.”

Our eyes met. Mine were misty, but hers were resolute.

“Cured?”

“Sometimes,” my sister told me, “Humans are born joined together like we are. And they can _fix_ them.”

‘Fix’? The word rattled around inside me uneasily.

She was usually the more soft-spoken one, the one who’d add a word to my statements. A parentheses to my phrases. But now she was weaving quite a few of her own. “There were old stories about the creatures humans bowed down to---creatures even more powerful than Diamonds.”

Had she lost her mind?

“And, at that time, humans had two faces. Four arms, four legs. These powerful creatures feared them, and so cut them in half, and that’s why they look the way they do now.”

“That’s ridiculous.” 

Together, we pulled our knees up to our unconnected chests.

“Regardless,” she mumbled, “It’s an interesting story.”

I thought for awhile before speaking again. “That makes it seem like the humans were made weaker by being split apart.”

She hummed through a bitten lip. “They seem to enjoy their solitude.”

“...Would you like that?” I finally asked without looking up at her.

“I...” She coughed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think about it sometimes...”

“As do I.”

“But we can’t.” She curled her arm, and lightly touched her shoulder blade. “And you know what, sister?”

“No. What?”

Her eyes closed, and her mouth curled up in a smile. When discussing something to intimate we almost always spoke to each other with our eyes locked, but she kept hers hidden as she said this. “Even if we got sliced apart,” my sister, my _dearest_ sister mumbled, “I would stay by your side until we both got shattered to pieces.”

I’ve kissed her from time to time. Always little pecks on her temple, her cheeks. But now I felt like pushing through the burning veil of tears accosting my eyes, just to be closer to her.

She apparently did, too. She turned her head, and I turned mine, our mirrored lips pressing together for the first time. Sweet stars above, we together tasted like salt and fear and the desperation that comes with hope.

I couldn’t stop. She couldn’t, either. Just kiss after kiss after kiss, as shy and chaste as virgin lovers, bouncing off each other as we cried, thinking of a life neither of us could have.

At the same time, we glanced down to the crook where our waists joined into hips. I gasped sharply as I felt her fingers entwine with mine.  
She was forever on the left. Me, forever on the right. She had no right arm, and I had no left; and yet, somehow, the hands we weren’t supposed to have had slipped together. I looked into her eyes, at the perfect reflection of my own face, and could tell she felt it too.

I choked the tight heat in my throat. _Sweet stars above._ Both of us, as separate sisters, were irrevocably broken... but at least, between us, we had two supple arms. And, at times like this, I could steal away a few moments of feeling her ghostly hand in mine.

One of us---but I wasn’t sure who---broke the silence. “From now until forever...”

“...We two go on as one.”

Indivisible.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm honestly not sure what to say about this one... except thanks for reading, of course :)


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